


Looks Like We've Got a Badass Over Here: Overture

by Etnoe



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Caliginous Romance | Kismesis, Flushed Romance | Matesprits, Missing Scene, Multi
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-03-15
Updated: 2013-03-15
Packaged: 2017-12-05 10:47:34
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,551
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/722196
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Etnoe/pseuds/Etnoe
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The trolls battle the Black King, and Gamzee discovers some of the fun that comes from having a score to settle.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Looks Like We've Got a Badass Over Here: Overture

**Author's Note:**

  * For [katspaw](https://archiveofourown.org/users/katspaw/gifts).
  * Inspired by [Clearing the Air](https://archiveofourown.org/works/490189) by [katspaw](https://archiveofourown.org/users/katspaw/pseuds/katspaw). 



> Thank you to Katspaw for offering her fic up for remix and the inspiration it provided! Some of the lines in this fic are from their fic _Clearing the Air_ , and then twisted a little to fit the context here.
> 
> Also, the Vriska ♠ Gamzee is more of a prelude to a romance at this point.
> 
> * * *

There are three moments that Gamzee really remembers of the fight against the Black King - three things he won't forget.

 

* * *

 

NOISE.

It starts loud, and it rises, it grows, it lives, thrives, swallows, rises.

It rises beyond bearable, beyond meaning, and in a very real way it's beyond the mind and the bone of his body. Gamzee feels nothing but the reverb of his skull and the knowledge that he can't take it. Waiting for a crack--

He hears a chime.

Chimes sound out again and again and cut through the other sound, and as simply as that his body is allowed to fit into itself; he can think again. But if somebody asked if he wanted to, he'd say the two of them could go and talk about it somewhere else. He's pretty sure no one's in the mood to ask, and not for him to joke about it either.

The Black King is still screaming - it's still _noise_ that you can hear with more than your ears alone.

It's eased off enough that Gamzee can peel back his eyelids, though, and see the lily pad in front of his face, a green that makes his eyes throb and water. The Black King had grabbed and dumped them up here on one of the Battlefield's flying lily leaves, like an audience for a concert. Gamzee unwraps his arms from around his head and drags his head upwards: There are the others, screaming back unheard, or curling up like him.

The King's before and above them, almost around them with his wings and tentacles outstretched and his sweet-strange scent giving a taste to the air; the final boss they'd all promised they'd beat. He's a black too dark to see into, like he's made up of a clouded night on a bi-lunar eclipse at absolute aphelion, so that it's hard to make out the joints and form of his piecemeal monster's body. There might as well be no battlefield and no more soldiers, because now that Gamzee's set eyes on him, it is something of a trial not to think that the Black King is all there is. 

But something else appears, easy to witness, spots of grey-silver shining against the King's bulk. Aradia. A whole lot of Aradia, each one of them appearing from out of nowhere with the chime and tinkle of those time-travel music boxes.

The Aradias are busy making all kinds of sounds, he realises. There's the music from the boxes, but they robots are glowing with power, and they're also making the kind of noise that make his eyes feel like they want to bend in their sockets and causes throbbing in every blood vessel from the neck up - the kind of noise you hear more inside your head than with your ears. It's almost like the King's scream, but points _his_ noise outwards and away so that it barely has time to hurt. What is this? What's Aradia? What's his own head if it's not a thing he knows pretty well having it sitting on his neck and keeping busy with its own business, instead of humming quietly and threatening to shatter? What's _anything_ , while he's at it, and the world's screaming and too bright.

The others start to stand around him. Gamzee squints to watch and sees that most of them are doing it - and now it's all of them - so he gets on to his feet too. Now they're looking up. Sure, why not?

Past the outstretched wings of the Black King, there is still a sky, and stars fall from it. There are faraway twinkles that look the same as any old stars, but there are plenty getting bigger and more twinkly, and others are turning fast into hot red-gold rock - some small as fists, and some as big as hives.

"We can absorb and redirect the psychic influence of the King's Vast Glub to minimise its damage to you." The Aradias make their announcement all at once, surround-sound. "There are enough of us to neutralise what Gl'bgolyb accidentally bequeathed. Go ahead and fight while you can."

The Black King's noise _stops_.

The quiet sends Gamzee staggering and groping like the very fucking air is a staircase and the banister's gone missing, and everyone gasps and chokes with the blessed shock of it. The King looks around at the robots, and then looks back down to study everybody on the lily pad with his mouth pressed shut, looking grim - and almost prim. His anger is a tar pit bubbling inside him - but he only looks disappointed and severe about it. It's regal as shit, really, which is weird. It's how Gamzee's been advised to think about being in his schoolfeeding, and told to be by Equius. This is no look he can copy.

Meanwhile, the others are jumping off the lily pad and getting out their weapons.

Gamzee's the last one to get away, and owes it to Sollux for dragging the lily pad out of the way with brainpower. The blue and red of psionics breaks into his vision and the feel of them crackles against his skin, and it makes things bend inside his head again. This is only supposed to happen when he has enough pies, isn't it? He hasn't had a god damned pie in so long. The lily pad gets dumped on the ground and he lies where it's stopped.

He closes his eyes. He opens them - later? - when the ground shakes too much to ignore.

Stars are falling like they need to take the place of raindrops. He watches. This is also bright enough that it makes pain lance through his eyes, but it's what was always meant to happen, isn't it? It's what was prophesised. 

The ground is losing the meteor fight like hell, but if the Black King doesn't seem to be from how much he's shouting at the Aradias and the crackling blue-purple-red spot of Sollux. The stars falling, and a vast and terrible sound - yeah, it really shows that prayers do come true. He'll pray that this hollow in his head goes away. Or he might lie here quietly. Some of the Aradias have built a makeshift wall out of fallen meteors and psychic power, and the worst of the worst of the battle is on the other side. It's not safe, but nothing's going to be as long as they're all here, and there's nowhere else to go.

Above the wall he can see the Black King swing his sceptre, and even more meteors streak down. But as they get closer there's a glow on a lot of them that means psychic powers, and as a crew of Aradias motion with their arms, they fly into the black of the King's body. His carapace cracks - there's a high spray of red, and he draws his wings tightly to his body, but he swings the sceptre again to club meteors into a cluster of robots, and they burn. The sky is all fire, and more of it falls.

 

*

 

Having Tavros in front of him is like waking up. First Gamzee hears the rocket chair, an unfamiliar buzz, and lazily rolls his head that way. The shape of the red-and-orange rocket chair is impossible to figure out for a second, but then Tavros leans over to peer down at him.

It focuses him before he knows it to see the curve of Tavros's mouth and the crinkle to his eyes. Tavros is smiling like he always does - again, finally, and at Gamzee, and he's bleeding.

"Bro, what--" Gamzee says, jerking to sit upright, and then feels too dizzy to finish the question. He sags back on one arm, the other hand pressed into his temple.

"The blood, right," says Tavros, swiping at the trickle of brown under his nose. "It's the blood, isn't it...? But this is not serious in any capacity, being a relatively common, if gross, effect of exposure to unusual levels of psychic power. And you have some too." He waves a hand under his nose to show where, hesitates, and then waves all over the lower half of his face and down his neck. "Uh, sorry..." he adds, like it's his fault. He always has been filled with empathy without meaning to be, though he tries to ignore that side of himself.

They haven't talked since that night when the game started. Tavros hasn't even been awake for the last few perigees. Gamzee had checked up on him over the server camera a few times to make sure none of his animal buddies had got carnivorous on the guy. Those moments had got him so used to thinking of Tavros's limp body, legs arranged carelessly beneath him as he curls up on a pile in his hive, that the image is still engrained firmly in Gamzee's memory, and it sends a dim ripple through him to think of it, like it's still what's in front of him. 

Tavros had been awake a while now, Gamzee reminds himself. Karkat had harassed him into leaving Prospit behind and trying to finish his quest. Now Tavros is awake, and right here, talking to him.

He kind of wants to do nothing but stare. He can feel himself starting to - but then, something sparking in his puzzle sponge, Gamzee finds himself looking for Vriska. He looks up, because she's always flying around lately - ever since the self-same night that Tavros had gone to sleep and stopped talking to everyone. He finds her on the ground, as unwilling as the rest of them to face the meteors: she's nearly hidden in front of Equius, but he can see her waving her arms around and talking, maybe with a grin on her face, even now.

She's too far away to hear them. Good. Right? That's probably a good thing.

"Zoning out!" says Tavros, and Gamzee looks back to a silly, sly grin. "You're caught out, uh, bro! But, on the other hand ... brain damage..." The grin pops off to make place for concern. "It is a possibility, considering ... well, wow, that is really a lot of blood. Especially for someone with no psychic powers."

Gamzee stares as he tries to remember the last time he got clocked in the skull. Then he stares at the flecks of blood still left on Tavros's chin. Definitely couldn't wipe that away for his friend. He shakes his head.

"Well, if you're sure…" Tavros's thumbs twiddle hard. "A highblood, such as you happen to be, should be pretty resistant…"

Gamzee nods. It's like talking back. Maybe, in fact, it could cross his heart to open his word hole. "Can feel it, though, brother. All being busy in my pan is some other minds working, and me with a serious sense of them being up and at their wriggling." They can really talk; he's not shy anymore and Gamzee doesn't have to stay away.

"It is, probably, a side-effect of the Black King's version of the Vast Glub. Which, as is obvious from the, uh, agony, is _extremely_ powerful. But I believe that we don't have to worry, maybe, as you seem, the same as ever. Which is," Tavros turns the rocket chair around to point elsewhere, "a positive thing, pretty much, as a point of fact, really ... so ... let's, uh, go over there?"

On his feet literally before he knows it, Gamzee finds himself trotting after. "We need," Tavros says, as they approach the others, lowering his voice, "to plan."

Gamzee watches his neck and ears glowing a faint copper. The two of them go among the others, falling quiet among the yelling. They stay next to each other, though Tavros doesn't look at him more than a few glances.

Focus has folded into itself and gone back to sleep. As the ground shakes, the music chimes, and the way protective wall radiates heat, and wobbles and reforms when it takes hard hits, Gamzee has no hope of knowing what the plan under discussion is. At some point Karkat tells him that exact thing, and says that he gets to be "way-back-up" and should try to tap the Black King in the snout if everyone else has already been killed, for vengeance. Equius is going to giving himself real jaw problems if he keeps grinding his teeth like that.

When they're finished planning, the Aradias that had joined the group fly off to tell the other robots and Sollux to slow down with the meteors. "Brother, hey," Gamzee says to Tavros, because everyone else is taking a second to do the same. Nepeta and Equius, Vriska and Terezi and Karkat, Kanaya and Eridan and Feferi. The atmosphere's happier than you'd think at a moment like this, but also about the right amount of sad. "Is your heart all right in how it's set to be jetting you into this wrecking ruckus?"

"I've, uh, got ... an important job, to do." Tavros has been stuttering and pausing as much as ever, his quick-strike think pan jumbling his clever words inside his mouth. It's worse now. "My denizen, and I - well, we had, a good talk. Uh, don't tell anyone else it was, a talk, and not a battle, please."

"I don't even motherfucking want to think at what my denizen all up and had to say." He'd killed him, though; Karkat and Equius had told him it was how all that was supposed to work. It probably keeps Tavros happier to think he has company in having a fat chat with his snake monster.

"If, perhaps, you want advice, I suspect it might, really be worth thinking about." He equips his lance and takes hold of the joystick on his rocket chair. "And for inspirational words, where I think that I have more authority, with all my practice, accumulated painstakingly ... I'll see you after this battle."

"Yeah?"

Tavros's grin goes impish. "Of course!" he says, and makes finger quotes, "'yeah'."

For a few more minutes everyone behind the wall clusters together and talks. Then the first wave goes around the wall - too soon, Gamzee says inside himself, but Karkat's insistent out loud about how it's the right time. Nepeta, Eridan, Terezi, Karkat, Tavros.

Kanaya, Equius, Feferi.

"I'm going over the top," Vriska says, and he realises that they're the only two left. "Like I'm made to sneak around the long way? Ha!"

He sort of nods and then wanders off. She doesn't follow, though she clicks her tongue loudly.

If it were Tavros, he'd probably know he was being watched even if he were absorbed in getting ready for a fight. Vriska's not like that - her excitement shrugs off whatever sense she might otherwise have had of Gamzee's eyes on her. Her hands are fists and she bounces on the balls of her feet, rocks back onto her heels. Every now and then she flips her hair out of her way. She's tilting her head way back to see over the wall and looks at how everyone moves - the Black King, the robot Aradias, Nepeta when she and Equius pull the cannonball manoeuvre. And she watches what Gamzee's trying not to look at - Tavros, speeding on rocket power and bounding up improbably on surges of perfectly controlled warm air as a tentacle or arm swipes close.

She's the one who gave him that rocket chair, back near the beginning of the game, and let him fly in waking life as well as dreams. She's the one who made him curl up and nearly die when the game was halfway through. She's made herself twice as much as she used to be, and with a flash of light, she's dressed in eye-sear orange with her own blue wings shimmering on her back. Vriska stands ready, her teeth bared at a monster made up of night with no clear weak spot. Is this supposed to be what a god looks like?

There's a vague heat winding its way through Gamzee's veins, his head cool and empty. His hands tighten as he looks on Vriska's face. She wants to kill. She probably will. She's beautiful.

Vriska runs towards the fight without any hesitation. She's even harder not to watch, though he's not quite sure why. There's something nagging inside him, and he swipes a fresh trickle of blood away from his ear.

Then, at last, he has to look away from her, because the Black King speaks. Not that terrible scream - the King's own voice rings out hugely from his cavernous chest, and as he postures his scent rising to something sharply chemical. He's still almost as hard to understand now as he was while making the Vast Glub, overwhelming in every aspect. But as he speaks the overall meaning comes out all right: He's cursing everybody.

They are heroes, he says, that he lent a haven to in his capital city, or who got the same treatment from the Prospitians. They are heroes who have lived up to their fullest potential, as the spies reported the Prospitians saw in their clouds: They have ruined his lands and they have exiled his peoples. They've left him alone and filled him with power and basically, if Gamzee's getting the gist here, he's going to eat them.

In Gamzee's opinion, they're more like a bunch of people who don't have time for this shit and would be better off without it. Everybody else's head probably hurts too.

It's supposed to be time to fight, right? He rubs the heels of his hands against his eyes. He could go if he wanted, even if it wasn't part of the plan. Like anybody had been serious about keeping him as the back-up...

There's a flash of orange and blue to the side, blinding bright, easy for his eye to slip on to. It's easy to follow.

 

*

 

He catches up with her on the star-wall. She isn't quite flying as she ascends, and she keeps her feet light and her wings fluttering as she steps here, flits there - and as her laughter adds to the battle-noise, it doesn't seem like she knows she's being followed. There's too much death and delight in her voice for her to pay attention and realise it. He also believes she can't feel the burn.

The stone stars are hot enough that it feels like they or he should melt, even through the psychic coating. Gamzee scrambles as fast as he can, and faster.

Vriska's the lucky one, right? So by some miracle - her supposed own - she might be missing the burn altogether. He moves along the path marked by the blue of her fairy-dust trail to get any benefit he can, and if it's too hot to breathe it's not too hot to keep moving. If he were a god-tier he might not feel any burn either. The overlong tails of her godhood snap and flutter before him, and for no good reason, he grabs and pulls - she pulls back, hollering shock and rage and hauling him upwards with a sudden jerk - and they both end up staggering up onto the top of the stone-star wall, half-crouched beside each other. Really close. He shakes his hand loose of her godhood and darts back.

He sees her eyes widen first in recognition and then in confusion - but his feet are close to on fire, and he's going to leave pieces of them behind if he doesn't jump. There are floating lily pads nearby, and he leaps up. Upwards is good - the only weakness he can spot on the Black King is those eight spider-eyes.

"Gamzee, what the _hell_?"

Vriska can follow him, though. She flies up.

"Ain't it being throwdown time?" he says, and all of a sudden his own voice annoys him. It's slow and meandering, and he cuts himself short to hear less of it. "It's all we've got time for. Is what seems to be the case."

He turns, crouches, and jumps, but she flies fast. Isn't it any effort for her? He moves faster.

"Makara, don't make me laugh!" They both dodge meteors, and keep going. Gamzee's lucky too - so there - because the lily pads lead him higher and closer. Vriska keeps talking, though. " _You're_ going to jump straight into the fray, just like that?"

"Three more jumps," said Gamzee, with that vague guilty feeling he got about taking things literally so it would annoy people. Guilty! About Vriska god damn god-tier Serket, who has most of her friends only because it could get you killed if you didn't know what she was doing.

Jump - "Go back to lying down and counting bleatbeasts on the ground!" - jump - "You're not cut out for this, you polka-dotted dumbass!"

On the third leap, she catches him, which actually is pretty nice of her - and she lifts him up past the Black King's head. He wrenches loose as soon as he can angle the right kind of drop to get that prime moustache for grabbing on to. It's rough enough to grip easily and Gamzee swings back and forth a bit, and then the Black King hits himself in the face trying to grab him.

Comedy gold. Somewhere out there, the messiahs are surely proud.

"Now what?" Vriska shrieks, over the sound of the King's fury, triumphant like she's won an argument and horrified like this was not the best one to win. Gamzee drops to grab onto a patch of sleek black fur on the Black King's neck. "Is that what you want? What _the hell_ are you _doing_?"

He's got no plan, nothing in his head or in his hands, but he looks up to that fairy in flight (shouldn't she be perfect, being a fairy and all? That's basically Tavros's opinion, but looking at her - isn't that a hilarious idea?), and the answer seems to be to rip all the laughter right out of her.

So he does. He can do that, motherfuck. The hollow in his head sings for it, and his blood leaks out slow one last time, drips from his ear, nose, and eyes.

Would he still be Bard of Rage, Gamzee wonders, if he were what the game would call a god? Would there be some other kind of title for him, something better? It's all right. He can get by.

Vriska knows something's happened to her. She's hovering near-still in the sky with jittery wing-flutters she surely isn't thinking about, now that she is made of aware of all that has been lost and all that could still be taken, and she looks awfully small. The expression on her face says _she knows that_.

He could stare at her for some time yet, but Gamzee looks down to the carapace he stands on. It's not like he can see a lot of the King from this angle, but he knows that he got the King's laughter too, by accident. The Black King had displayed none at all, but it seems like carapacians can have a fair supply of giggles stocked in the back of them even if they aren't specially job-titled for it. Who had this douchebag ever laughed with? The King doesn't know either, and with that absence he's getting madder than he was before, even faster.

That sounds like the start of a plan. Gamzee concentrates, and what he does feels like cranking his skull open and letting the hollow feeling in his head eat outwards, spreading into the air. Then it feels like, well, rage.

It settles. It's satisfying.

Every last one of them who left him behind and the circumstances that drove them to it, that girl who drove his boy into nothing and dares to take herself for a god and to wear it like she's best-blessed, every star that pancaked the whole of his own world, every unconquered territory he never would get to rule, this endless future of exile loomed up before him, and this fight that some would insist he'd lose: Gamzee sings for it all with his mouth open and a roar pouring out of his throat. A blood haze blanks out all but the most important part of his vision. There, in the redoubled-darkness of the carapacian's skin, is a natural chink in the exoskeleton at the place where neck and collarbone would meet for a troll.

The Black King is hardly sure what he's here for anymore. If he's not mad, what's he meant to do to them? He stumbles as noise rises of an attack from below, the sound of Eridan's rifle.

Even if the others join in, it doesn't mean Gamzee can't contribute. The world's in a haze again, and the confusion-scent that pours out of the Black King makes an oiliness that slicks his carapace, so that Gamzee slips and falls, but that doesn't mean he will not make his mark with great vengeance and furious anger.

He means to reach for his clubs. He can't pay enough attention, and he and every borrowed part of him is here to win. Instinct puts _something_ in his strife specibus that _feels_ sort of like a club, but…

It's too big to hold. He twists in mid-air to grab it two-handed, and there is knowledge in the rage. The King's sceptre is in his hands.

He rips it from the King's hold and it recognises what he took from the Black King - and he's the size of an ant beside it, but that recognition is enough to allow him to wield it. It should be impossible to lift, but he's noticed what kind of a game they've all been playing. What does impossible mean these days?

The orbs around the head of the sceptre glow in response to the new shape of its wielder. At this moment he knows that this is what happens every time it senses that the Black King has transformed. It's shrinking to make itself easier for him to hold, so he'd better be quick—

Gamzee swings his body down to flip the sceptre's fall round and up, and it listens so that well that the momentum shoots it way past the King's head. What's that yelling down below? Did Sollux almost just let himself drop out of the sky over there? He kicks his legs down the length of the sceptre as he pulls with his arms stretched as far up as he can reach, making it spin as it falls, and he spins around with it, guiding. He knows how, it knows how. It jams down at exactly the place he means it to: The tip wedges into that join at the King's neck. It slips into the chest plating, much smaller now and not yet enough to kill, but Gamzee wrenches down hard and it's still big enough to rip a giant jagged chunk off the top of the King's chest plate in a creak, a crunch, and such a gush of vivid red blood that he can hear it spill.

And the sceptre is still, after all, too big for him to hold. It's still wedged into the Black King, but dips steeply as the plating comes away. Gamzee's got only his arms wrapped around it now, and both arms slip - and then it's his sweat-slick hands coming off, and he's falling again.

A robot gets hold of him, now. A few Aradias hover over him, one says something, and … suddenly there's nothing to him. His body can barely feel him, and everything he stole is going back to where he took it.

The Black King won't be a danger even with his rage back. _That_ was a winning  
blow, Gamzee's sure, and he smiles in reply to everything the Aradias say as they set him down. Feferi, Equius, Karkat, and Terezi run over, and they're talking too; the others hang back, watching. It's all right, they can relax now; he's won.

He already forgot that he took something from Vriska, too.

There's a scream from the sky - short and reactive. The Black King moves reflexively towards it, tentacles wrapped tight over what's left of his chest to staunch the blood, but Vriska didn't make it because of him. She has her hands fisted in her hair and she isn't even looking at the King right now.

He shouldn't have taken the happiness out of her, and that ability to grin when she and her future and all of her friends are in danger. She's Vriska. It's not that she can call herself a god - it's enough that she's _Vriska Serket_.

She hurls her dice right into the Black King's face. He swings a hand to swat them and her away, grunting long and low with the pain, but she swoops out of the way. Then the dice hit the ground, and Vriska is transformed.

The blue she surrounds herself with is easy to look at. She's prioritised the King over him, which Gamzee is all for. He steps back, and sits down. Soon enough the others get tired of freaking out at him, and they go to help Vriska. It's not necessary.

The Black King topples to her sword.

She would have laughed, if the feel of it had already settled comfortably back into her. But she does grin, baring her teeth enough that he can see it from down where he sits. He looks at it long enough that he doesn't see the world go.

But it does, and leaves in its place a simple, green hive-looking shape, and a door, still closed.

 

* * *

 

"What … the actual fuck," says Tavros, "just happened?"

Everybody else is doing an awe and silence thing, turning to see stars that are settled peaceably in their sky, and watching the door.

All Gamzee can say with certainty is that there was that motherfucking _noise_ , and his palms are shiny with burns, and he will always remember how it is when Tavros smiles.

He can't say that, so it's just as well when a foot hooks into his ankle - he can see it, since he's looking down at the floor so he won't have to look at Tavros - and yanks.

Vriska looms way up above him with her foot on his chest. "Didn't think you had it in you," she hisses.

He opens and shuts his mouth hopelessly. _Didn't think I'd have a bit of somebody like you in me_ could sound, like, inviting.

"Gamzee Makara," and her heel digs in. At least she's in her regular clothes, so it's not the heel of a boot but just her running shoes. Then her eyes narrow and she moves her leg away, and then she crouches beside him. He finds out that Vriska's also a staring type, in a way - she takes in his hands folded together, tears in his shirt, blood on his face and soaked down his front from the Black King, his hair and eyes and jaw, his lips and nose and tips of his ears, it seems like.

"This seems like _more_ , 'what the actual fuck'," Tavros mutters.

" _Gamzee_. Gamzee!" Vriska's conspiratorial. "I should have _known_ you had it in you." She widens her eyes quickly, a little like she can't believe what Past Vriska let slide - the look's recognisable from the way Karkat looks in the early stages of losing it. "Well, highblood. You won't have me fooled again, however good you are at putting that dumb look on your face."

She pats the dumb look on his face, specifically on the cheek area. He feels the blood rise fast to her touch, and sees her eyes go straight to the tips of his ears, where the makeup doesn't cover the blush. Fuck vision eightfold mighty unrighteously. Her smile is mostly bare teeth again, and he can already feel it in his throat. Vriska would - she would if she wanted to, nothing will stop her from what she wants to--

She's gone just like that, and he's left disoriented and heart-thudding on the ground.

"Uh," says Tavros, as Gamzee stands back up; "Uuuuhh," Gamzee replies, and they leave it at that for the time being, and turn to where everyone else is looking.

The door's about to open.

The sky had fallen, and there had been a vast and terrible sound, and it raises in Gamzee an expectation too specific to be comfortable. Could it really be the paradise planet? Is this the way he - and his friends, after all, even in their lack of faith - are meant to come upon it? That's what it sounded like, a bit, this game's Ultimate Reward thing. He can't hope for that. But what kind of faithful person wouldn't hope for that at every opportunity? But is he really blessed enough to make it there?

Tavros is close enough for Gamzee to steady himself on the rocket chair, and Tavros grins at him, and that feels right. They look around at the others as Karkat shuffles forwards to open the door, excited, disbelieving, overjoyed. Vriska catches his eye and grins at him, and that feels ... it feels like if he's not ready, he'd better make sure he is soon, because she's not going to wait for anything. But they'll all start out together.

They wait to see what happens next.


End file.
